Russ Huffer has made three presentations in the last 18 months that
I’ve been able to hear and I think he’s got it right. We are wrong.
The outgoing CEO of Apogee Enterprises contends that our industry is
doing itself a disservice in the arena of energy efficiency. First on
the list, photovoltaics. “They are not there yet,” he says, “they cannot
work effectively unless they are angled. This is a huge design disadvantage.”
Huffer says that until or unless someone can provide PV technology that
is efficient at a zero-degree vertical orientation, the technology will
not be fully embraced.

And, he contends, the bigger disservice we are doing ourselves is to
allow our industry to be the whipping boy of energy efficiency, photovoltaic
or not.

“Look at my building in Minnesota,” he said at Glass TEXpo ’10. “There’s
such light coming through that it creates a tremendous glare. So we
close the shades. Then what do we do? We put on the lights. So on a
beautiful sunny day we are blocking the natural sunlight that would
require no interior lighting and using interior lighting and the energy
to produce it.”

The same is true for heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC)
costs. “We build buildings with inoperable windows so we can never take
advantage of the outside temperatures when it’s comfortable. So we use
energy to do what nature could have done for free,” he says. And who
gets blamed for this? The glass industry does.

I think he’s right. While all the glass suppliers jockey to show how
their glass meets certain energy performance specifications, they fight
each other for that business. They don’t fight the real enemy.

What almost no one ever does is look at what the choice of glass does
to the energy costs of other materials in the building, specifically
HVAC, lighting, sunshades and more. All these choices need to be evaluated
in a continuum and not on a separate Master Spec basis.

The glass industry has everything to gain with such a continuum review.
No industry has done more to advance the energy performance qualities
of its materials in a shorter time than the glass industry. And we keep
pushing to do so.

There are two crucial things the people who write the codes don’t understand.
First, residential projects are very different than commercial projects.
In residential work, the companies doing the building rarely own their
projects after completion. They sell them to homeowners. The codes have
done an effective job of making builders use more energy-efficient materials,
and the Department of Energy and other governmental and environmental
agencies have done a good job of helping create homeowner demand for
energy-efficient homes.

The commercial market is different, especially now that fewer buildings
are being built on spec. The building owner will reap the benefits or
pay the consequences of his choices in materials and has an inherent
incentive to be efficient.

But the building owner can only be so efficient and that is the second
problem. There is no one, really, who looks at all of the energy components
on an integrated basis. Glazing contractors often provide alternatives
to what’s spec’d that will cost a bit more for the glass yet save thousands
a year in HVAC costs. (It’s no accident that the HVAC industry is promulgating
energy codes such as ASHRAE 90.1.) Yet these alternatives often are
not utilized.

I asked Paul Sternberg, a noted architect with the firm CSO Architects
Inc. in Indianapolis, about this at the Glass Expo Midwest ’11 earlier
this month. He said the problem is that no one has yet taken on such
integration review. “Because the function is not required, no one will
pay for it, so who will do it? I hope there is more integration review
in the future, but that is not the case today,” he said.

The glass industry would win big if there were. So would the country.

-Deb

P.S. Some of you may have seen the story
on page 60 announcing Lyle
Hill’s retirement from MTH Industries. Though Lyle is retiring from the
company, he recently told me he has an announcement coming soon and plans
to remain active in the industry. You will be happy to know he will continue
his popular column here in USGlass. Here’s how our conversation went:

Me: Lyle, though you are retiring from MTH, will you write about
the glass industry for us?

Him: You’ve been trying to get me to write about the glass industry
for years, but I say why start now? You’ve obviously never read my articles,
because you’d see I try hard to write about anything BUT the glass industry.
So I’ll keep on writing my column, yes, but I’m not changing a thing.
Me: Uh … and I am very glad about that.
(And I really am.)